Mobile

This week, Chrome For Android M26 was announced. It has the literally-awesome ability to record video via `getUserMedia()`, but enough about making Skype irrelevant. What’s even more interesting is the new data compression feature. Which, to be clear, is experimental, has to be switched on, doesn’t apply to secure (SSL) sites, and it’s only running Read the rest…

What has sometimes been described as mobile middleware has taken a new tack. Now, the idea of Backend as a Service (BaaS) has begun to take off in the mobile application development space. Proponents of BaaS say it helps developers easily build mobile apps, or any other applications connected to a cloud backend. Some of Read the rest…

HP continues to divulge bits and pieces of a road map for the ill-starred and nearly-orphaned webOS. The company has followed up its December plan to release webOS mobile platform and development tools with a proposed timeline, with a full release set before year’s end. Some people see a life for the associated Enyo JavaScript Read the rest…

As it kicked off its yearly developer event, Adobe announced that it had acquired Nitobi Software, maker of PhoneGap open source software for cross-platform mobile application building with HTML5 and JavaScript. In a blog, Nitobi CEO Andre Charland pledged to pursue donation of the PhoneGap code to the Apache Software Foundation ”to ensure open stewardship Read the rest…

jQuery Mobile Alpha 3 increases browser support to include Firefox Mobile, Opera Mobile / Mini. Improvements reported on support for iOS, Android, BlackBerry 6, and Palm WebOS. Moreover, the Ajax navigation system has been … deeply re-factored to improve performance and handle more edge cases. This includes event handling for click, submit, and hashchange, all Read the rest…

Performance Wonk Steve Souders has announced Jdrop – described as a JSON repository in the cloud. It builds on his work with Mobile Perf javaScript meta-bookmarklets that can work as profilers for mobile devices. Bookmarklets gather data and display data. The data can be saved to Jdrop. For analysis. Souders blogs: It was pretty simple Read the rest…

James Pearce has started a fascinating series, called WhitherApps.com, trying to rewrite the BBC iPhone application and other native mobile apps using HTML5. From the kickoff blog post: WhitherApps is a bandwagon-busting experiment. I believe there are far too many native client apps which could have been far better written as mobile web apps. What Read the rest…

I have had the pleasure to start working with the awesome jQuery team on a new mobile development. Today, John announced jQuery Mobile, “a unified user interface system across all popular mobile device platforms, built on the rock-solid jQuery and jQuery UI foundation.” Palm has sponsored the effort with other great folks, and I wrote Read the rest…

Using the mobile Web with modern devices that give you the “full Web” and allow you to zoom in and out on the page (if zooming hasn’t been turned off of course). Sam Stephenson (of Prototype and 37Signals fame) has taken on the problem of the sizing of controls. If you zoom out, normally, controls Read the rest…

As I walked around Moscone last week, I saw some prophets speaking of a future that isn’t all Native. A future where the Web is the platform. Others saw it too: I pondered who would be behind the act and smiled as I had a good idea. The group behind this all is the newly Read the rest…

Steve Gill of Nitobi has posted about a PhoneGap application called SnowReports. The application is open source and forkable on GitHub and shows how you can take a mobile Web application and port it between iPhone, Android, and webOS (and PhoneGap itself can even go beyond to other platforms such as Nokia/Blackberry). Steve also put Read the rest…

Douglas “My Guns Are Bigger Than Yours” Crockford sent us a pointer to Moonwatcher’s post on entitled “My MacBook Pro runs JavaScript 26.7x as fast as my iPad“. After Moonwatcher ran SunSpider on the iPad, he concluded: It’s one thing not to be able to run Flash apps. But JavaScript performance like this effectively means Read the rest…

Twitter released an official Android application today that looks clean and to the point. A mobile Web version of a Twitter client, Tweet Me was released on webOS, and I think it raises the bar. It is beautiful and a pleasure to use: This is a segue into some posts that I have penned recently Read the rest…

David Aurelio of the awesome Uxebu has been working on TouchScroll, a library that implements scrolling in a way that mimics the native scrolling of a device such as an iPhone, Android, or Pre. Other libraries such as jQtouch and the Mojo library itself (used in Ares) do this work too in their own worlds. Read the rest…